Bassist Robert "Dancin' " Perkins played clubs around town and for several years at the Chicago Blues Festival.

Bassist Robert "Dancin' " Perkins played clubs around town and for several years at the Chicago Blues Festival. (Family photo)

Graydon MeganChicago Tribune

Bassist Robert “Dancin’ ” Perkins was a Maxwell Street bluesman whose signature look included a cowboy hat and boots and whose signature moves included shuffles, a bluesy moonwalk and even occasional splits.

“He couldn’t sit still,” said his son Chris Alexander, a drummer who played with his father. “So he started dancin’ with the bass.”

“A very flamboyant showman,” writer David Whiteis said.

Perkins was known as Mr. Pitiful when he led groups that included the Blues Busters and the Teardrops. He was a regular at the original Maxwell Street and played also at the new Maxwell Street location, clubs around town and for several years at the Chicago Blues Festival, where his performances can be seen on YouTube.

Perkins, 86, died of natural causes Aug. 15 in his Englewood neighborhood home, his son said.

Perkins was born in Grenada, Miss., and came to Chicago with his mother as a youngster. He got started in music with a guitar he made himself, one he was only allowed to play under his mother’s supervision, his son said. He shifted from guitar to the electric bass guitar and began playing on the old Maxwell Street in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

“Perkins was one of the last of the great and wildly eccentric Maxwell Street blues performers,” writer Justin O’Brien, a longtime observer of the Chicago blues scene, said in an email. O’Brien noted that Perkins was of the same generation as such blues performers as Jimmie Lee Robinson, Frank Scott and Smilin' Bobby.

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In 2010, he played the Front Porch stage of the Chicago Blues Festival. In a video of a set with his son on drums, he directed the crowd’s attention to each of the other players as they took turns showcasing their skills, calling on the crowd to “check him out.”

Then it was his turn. “I’m up here checking everybody else out. I guess I may as well check myself,” he said, before launching into some complicated, syncopated and athletic dance steps that were more than impressive for a man in his late 70s. The crowd and his fellow players loved it.

Like many musicians, Perkins had a day job. He was a crane operator for a South Side Chicago company, Alexander said. He began work at 17, retired in his mid-70s, but was called back to work another few years, finally retiring for good in his early 80s.

As Mr. Pitiful early in his career, he led a group called the Teardrops that also featured Morris Holt, better known as Magic Slim, on guitar. When Perkins left the group, Holt took over.

Blues musician Larry Taylor played with Perkins on the South and West sides in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Taylor said in an email that Perkins didn’t only play the blues. “He was a good musical artist,” Taylor said. “He played bass, could play everything, sing and dance — soul, R&B blues.”

His wife, Vera Alexander Perkins, died in 1998.

Perkins is survived by four other sons; five daughters; and many grandchildren.